Oi, EMC users! HALVE your weight with this WEIRD OLD TIP

HP has released a product to import data from ENC VNX and CLARiiON CX4 arrays into its 3PAR storage, allowing customers to move to Meg W's StoreServ arrays – and, at least according to HP, dealing with storage obesity en route.

HP claims there's no need for resource-intensive planning, change management and data migration. Instead users can do it themselves, with any StoreServ 7000 series, 10000 series and all-flash 7450 being grateful recipients for the EMC-stored data. Indeed, HP goes further and says "data migration with 3PAR Online Import is less disruptive to applications and can performed faster than other methods".

VNX2, or earlier VNX arrays, need an OS upgrade and full data migration as part of a move to VNX4 arrays, the vendor claims.

HP states: "Replacing EMC VNX and CLARiiON CX4 arrays with VNX2 requires 40 per cent to 80 per cent more commands than upgrading to HP 3PAR StoreServ, and involves either data migration tools that consume host resources and impact application performance or necessitates the use of costly additional hardware appliances."

Storage obesity treatment?

According to HP, the import software "leverages the HP 3PAR Gen4 ASIC to drive efficient, inline, fat-to-thin conversion that takes fully provisioned (or fat) volumes from a legacy storage system and uses zero-block deduplication technology to convert them into thin-provisioned volumes on HP 3PAR StoreServ. It is this built-in fat-to-thin conversion capability that enables HP to offer a 50 per cent capacity savings guarantee to EMC customers as part of the Get Thin Guarantee program(me)."

HP SVP and Storage general manager David Scott came up with a pithy quote: "We’re removing the data migration roadblock to enable affordable tier-1 storage for trapped EMC customers.”

The import software is available at no charge to 3PAR StoreServ customers for 180 days, with the HP 3PAR OS Suite, version 3.1.2 MU2 and later.

Barry Ader, product marketing VP in EMC's Enterprise and Midrange Systems Division, said: “We (strongly) urge customers to read the fine print and carefully evaluate the claims of so-called 'online migration capabilities'. There are a lot of complexities and variables related to OS, hypervisor and application support. Marketing is easy; it’s the execution and fine print that matters.” ®